Now Comes the Mist

CHAPTER FOUR

T he waltz I danced with Quincey Morris had been lively, but the music for my dance with Arthur is lush, melancholy, and romantic. Arthur, of course, is a perfect dancer as is required of men of his class, and I know that he and I make a beautiful pair to watch as we move across the ballroom. His feet touch the hem of my skirts, light as feathers, and my waist seems formed to exactly fit his hand. If only we could be as serene on the inside as we appear on the outside.

From the muscle still twitching in his jaw and the involuntary tightening of his hand around mine, I can see that he is as discomfited as I am. At least he is looking at me now, so directly that it is almost shocking. To his credit, he does not miss a single step of the waltz.

The other couples laugh and talk in low voices as they dance around us, but Arthur and I remain silent. I know he is waiting for me to say something, but after that reproach from my mother about being too outspoken, I will not utter a word until he does so first.

“Miss Westenra, thank you for the pleasure of this dance,” he says at last.

“You are welcome, Mr. Holmwood,” I say with chilly formality.

“I couldn’t help overhearing what you were saying a moment ago.” His gaze falters, but his eyes do not stray from mine. “Do you believe what you said? That I … do not care for you?”

“I would not have said so if it were not true,” I say, repeating his words with an ironic smile. My reply seems to distress him, but relenting is not in my nature. “I must be honest. I do not know what to make of you. This is the second time in our acquaintance that you have asked me to dance, and tonight, you sent me flowers. Yet you never look at me or speak to me. You do not acknowledge my existence. Why are you astonished, Mr. Holmwood, to hear my assumption that I never cross your mind?”

The dismay on his face would be comical were it not so genuine. “Miss Westenra, I am grieved to hear that my behavior has led you to this conclusion.”

“It is not just your behavior,” I say calmly as we sail past Mamma and her friends. My mother is putting on a decent show of appearing cheerful and gay, but I can tell she is wondering—and fearing—what I could be saying to Arthur. “But also the behavior of other gentlemen, to which I have been comparing yours. I can name at least seven other men in this room who seem more willing to converse with me than you are.”

“Seven?” Arthur almost groans.

I look up at the ceiling, pretending to think. “Seven who are age-appropriate and unattached. If you expand that number to include the men who are either too old or too married to even think of speaking to me, then the list of names grows significantly longer.”

He blinks down at me. “You are … teasing me.”

“A bit,” I admit.

For a moment, we stare at each other. And then the most unexpected thing happens.

Arthur Holmwood laughs.

He laughs, and it transforms him. And every memory of Dr. Seward’s beautiful hands and Quincey Morris’s charm disappears from my mind in the light of Arthur’s face laughing. His eyes crinkle, his jaw softens, and on the right side of his mouth is a perfect, kissable dimple. And now that I have made him laugh, I am filled with the most urgent need to do it again and to hold on to his smile before it disappears.

“You are so full of life,” he says, and that is unexpected as well. “You always have been, ever since we were children playing in your garden. Do you know … I believe I have never known anyone in our circle as long as I have known you? When I look back at my childhood, it seems that you have always been there.”

I am stunned. This is the most that Arthur Holmwood has ever spoken in my presence, and I am afraid to reply for fear of scaring him off, so I let him surge on. He seems to be talking as quickly as he can, letting the words out before his courage fails him.

“But we were never friends,” he says. “And I think that was my fault.”

“How so?” I ask.

“Well, I was always afraid of you.”

It is my turn to laugh, hoping he will laugh with me so I can see that dimple again.

But his face remains serious. “You were too brilliant, you see, with your frocks and your smile and the way you beat everyone at every game. I still remember how you destroyed Peter Redmond and Edward Hart at cricket in every sense of the word one summer. They were angry at being defeated by a girl, and you told them they should have been more upset about losing so spectacularly after boasting about their skills.”

“How do you remember that?” I ask, astonished.

“I remember everything about you,” Arthur says softly, and a warmth spreads out from the core of my body to every fingertip. “But I only watched from afar because I knew I didn’t deserve you. A timid, coddled boy like me? With no gift for sport, no courage, no cleverness, and no conversation? I suspected I would always remain in the background of your life.”

The waltz ends, but we continue dancing as another piece of music begins.

“I went off to school, and every holiday, I came back to find you even more brilliant. Even more beautiful.” His cheeks redden, but his voice remains steady. “You grew up into the woman I expected you to become, and I knew someone like you could never notice me.”

“Arthur,” I say helplessly. It is the first time in our adult lives that I have said his name to him, as though we are more to each other than what he has described. As though that name is very dear to me. He hears it in my voice, and emotion washes over his face.

“With all your liveliness, I could see there was something different about you after you lost your father. Forgive me for touching on a painful subject,” he adds quickly. “But I know you’ve been sad for a long time. I … I still watch you, you see. Even if it seems like I never do. You always touch your locket whenever someone mentions him, and your eyes … It’s like you go somewhere. Somewhere you can be alone and not pretend anymore.”

I look down at the gold and jet locket around my neck, stunned that solid, emotionless, seemingly unobservant and uncaring Arthur has seen so much of me. “There’s a photograph of Papa inside,” I say. “It was the last one taken of him before he died.”

We are both silent, lost in thought, moving among the other couples without seeing them.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,” he says quietly. It is the first time in our adult acquaintance that he has ever said my name. “Every time I saw you struggling, I wished I could help. But I didn’t know how. Or whether my sympathy would be welcome to you.”

I study every inch of his face, from his grave brow beneath his walnut-colored hair to his eyes, both tender and serious, and the slight cleft in his chin. And I realize that aside from Mina, this man might be the only one to have ever seen a bit of the true me. Me , the woman behind the flirtatious smile and the fluttering silk fan. The woman who is still the girl who had never gotten over so much loss and death, and who may never do so.

“I want you to know,” I tell Arthur, “that you have not been in the background of my life for some time. You have been in the front, with your back turned to me.”

His lips tremble. The hope in his eyes is almost terrifying and breathtaking to behold. “My back has never been turned to you,” he says in a voice so low that I can barely hear it over the music of the orchestra, “and it never will be.”

I am surprised to find my eyes are wet as I smile up at this shy, sweet, and timid man who has just confessed to being afraid of me for most of our lives.

Arthur smiles back, the dimple appearing again. “Jack Seward doesn’t mean anything to you, then?” he asks, searching my face. “I heard you say that he sent you flowers tonight, too. Roses. And I feared that you … and he …”

I can’t help it. I lower my eyelashes, enjoying his anxiety.

“And Quincey Morris. I saw you laughing as you danced with him, and I thought … I was worried that …” He groans at my silence. “Lucy, you’re torturing me.”

“Only because you’ve tortured me ,” I tell him.

It isn’t even remotely an answer to his questions, but he reads the truth in my eyes. His hand is firm but gentle on my waist, and I am awash in memories of the first time he held me this way, on another night at another ball. This time, it is different. This time, we have come dangerously close to admitting that we are important to each other. That we have, each in turn, been watching the other from afar and wondering if we will ever share more than a childhood and a single dance.

I look at our joined hands and run my thumb slowly across the side of his palm. He swallows hard, a lump moving down the length of his throat. I lean closer to him, imagining the taste of his neck on my lips and tongue. I know that he, too, is envisioning my kiss from the hungry way he is watching my mouth, though he tightens his hold on my waist to keep us a decorous distance apart. There is a fierce possessiveness in his eyes that both inflames and repels me. I want to fling myself into his arms and feel him against me. But I know that to do so would be to become what society demands of me: the property of a man, even if that man is Arthur. Even if I have dreamed of belonging to him since October.

“Lucy,” he says, very low, and then the music ends.

I pull away, letting go of his hand. I feel as though I cannot take in enough air.

“Lucy,” he whispers, looking straight at me. It is far too easy to imagine us alone in a room together, and Arthur murmuring my name against my ear. I can imagine the weight of his ring on my finger and the warmth of his body on mine. He will know every freckle on my skin and every corner of my heart and my dark, dark mind. He will discover that I am not the bold, brilliant, laughing girl he thought I was. When I take his hand and his name for my own, I will no longer be able to hide myself from him.

And if I let myself fall for this man—if I allow myself to truly love him—he will become yet another person I must one day lose forever.

Arthur is not the one who is afraid. Not right now.

“Lucy?” His face is creased with worry. “I’m sorry. Have I said anything? I—”

I press a hand against my chest, struggling to breathe, and then I hurry away.

I almost run back to the safety of meaningless flirtations and long looks at men in whom I haven’t the slightest interest. My slippers carry me to the very farthest corner of the drawing room, where I stay away from Arthur, and we do not speak for the remainder of the night.